Did Peter and Paul get offed internally, by internecine Christian disputes? Almost certainly not, and let's deconstruct the bad reasoning

A VERY interesting comment on r/AcademicBiblical, that, if one strips away legendary interpretations of 1 Clement, Peter and Paul may indeed have faced that.

Or may not. We'll get into this below.

So to start, let's look at the possibly very interesting comment:

So then in 1 Clement 5 and 6, it discusses other violence caused by jealousy that has impacted Christian families, at which point Clement says in 7.1: "These things, beloved, we write unto you, not merely to admonish you of your duty, but also to remind ourselves." In short, Clement is admonishing Christians for the previous acts. So what are those previous acts? Well, those also include the deaths of Peter and Paul. 

Scholars have attempted to argue that 1 Clement mirrors Tacitus on the Neronian Persecution where he writes of a great multitude being killed (πολύ πλήθος) and this is argued to be paralleling Tacitus, Annals 15.44 where he writes that a large crowd were killed (multitudo ingens). But this is probably incorrect, the primary reason being that Clement is not talking about a singular event but an accumulation, i.e., he is saying that the deaths of Peter and Paul can be added to sequentially other previous deaths. Thus, this is not a specific event being referenced. Likewise, scholars argue the introduction of the letter may refer to the persecution of Nero or Domitian, but Bernier and others have reviewed the opening and found it is actually kinda just typical of a delayed letter. 

So, there is a good case Paul and Peter were killed by fellow Christians. This would explain also why Luke-Acts ignores Paul's death, because Luke-Acts is obsessed with trying to present the early church as a more or less united front. Christians killing each other is as far from this as one gets. We also know early Christians were not violence averse. The portrayal of both Paul and Peter is that the former was a persecutor himself, had it out against perceived false teachers, and Peter dismembered a Roman guard, killed two people for not giving him money (which some early Christians even interpreted as being extreme, like John Chrysostom), and also some portray him as killing Simon Magus. We also know Peter and Paul also greatly disagreed with each other on multiple fronts (see Galatians 2). So we even have a potential motivation for a lethal intra-community conflict.

There you go.

But? Problematic, as it turns out, as is the commenter in other ways.

First, let's be upfront with the overblown claims.

Annias and Sapphira weren't killed for not giving Peter money. First, they and others gave their money to the church, in the story, which in reality didn't exist. Second, they weren't killed for not giving money; the story is about ALL their money, or not. Third, they weren't even killed for that; they were killed for lying about whether this was their "all" or not. Acts 5 makes that clear!

On the second one? Peter didn't "dismember" the guard, at least not as the word is understood connotatively. The guard doesn't end up like Monty Python's Black Knight; he loses only an ear.

Self-touted independent "scholar" Hansen is getting all sorts of stuff wrong in combination with misinterpreting or overinterpreting. Not surprising.

On the third one? If you're plumping for an early date (late 90s CE, the "conventional" date) you just petard-hoist, since at least in writing, the story of the death of Simon Magus doesn't make its appearance until the Acts of Peter, dated late second century.  OOPPPSSSSS. More on that below.

In addition, standing an "orthodoxer" on his head, Clement citing Titus, and apparently 2 Peter, is proof of its lateness based on their lateness! 

Beyond that, Hansen offers no support for this being an "accumulation," at least not here, just an assertion.

Kind of going down the Jesus mythicism route, Chrissy Hansen appears to be doing Candida Moss (with whom I agree on martyrdoms, or lack thereof) on steroids, and claim that 1 Clement talks about internecine Christian battles leading to both Peter and Paul being killed by Christian subgroups. But, as noted above, wrong. Hansen claims that it reflects a culmination of a list of deaths. But, if you accept Candida Moss that early era martyrological deaths of Christians are likely legend, and you know that Acts' story of Stephen is ahistorical, WHAT "accumulation"? We could have Jesus in Luke 11:51, but that's all Tanakh deaths, and I read Hansen as presenting this as Christian deaths. 

Speaking of? There's two MORE problems, at least.

They begin with the fact that this "issue," whatever it actually is only runs in Chapters 4-7 of 1 Clement. Second, per this translation, the most modern of the three at Early Christian Writings, we have issues in chapters 6 and 7.

First of all, who the heck are the "Danaids and Dircae" in chapter 6? They're originally women from Greek myth. Per this site, Clement is supposedly referring to Christian women martyred in the style of their deaths. I find that doubtful, to pivot back to Moss. Clement claims these women are part of "a great multitude of the elect [who] furnished us with a most excellent example." That's Martyr Hagiography 101, and in short, further undermining of the idea that anything in Chapters 4-7 allegedly in semi-current times to author is actually historical.

Second, chapter 7:

These things, beloved, we write to you, not merely to admonish you of your duty, but also to remind ourselves. For we are struggling in the same arena, and the same conflict is assigned to both of us.

That struggle today surely isn't talking about violence unto the point of death at Rome or wherever the actual provenance of 1 Clement was, and ditto at Corinth. Methinks that level of violence would have been picked up 40 years later by Celsus. Rather, per the end of chapter 6, it appears to be about envy and strife in general. Paul talks about being "displayed" in the arena in 1 Corinthians 4 and fighting wild beasts at Ephesus in 1 Corinthians 15. Even if the second is literal, the first is not. To me, it's clear this is a metaphorical struggle in 1 Clement 7.

If Hansen claims otherwise, they're not even close to being a "scholar."

(Up above, the orthodoxer's appeal against this representing an empire-wide persecution and thus as support for early dating means nothing, as there was no such persecution until the third century.)

So, I think thought at first the 1 Clement idea is at least somewhat interesting, and Hansen even has a video about it. Is it plausible? Probably not, and certainly not as Hansen presents it as far as details. Probable? Most likely not, again, especially with the above caveats.

I'm not saying it's 100 percent IMprobable, but the OP on this post, talking about it, does raise issues. I've noted elsewhere that I reject traditional dating of 1 Clement, which may be 130-140 CE, so her interpretation, and that of David Eastman to the same end, may be iffy there, too. And, with that much later of a data, this idea then becomes early Christian urban legend. Eastman offers no suggested date for 1 Clement and appears to accept Tacitus, a very likely interpolation, at face value on Neronian persecution. This started my debate with Hansen which I have eventually ended. (Also at r/AcademicBiblical, ex-Mormon plumps for a conventional date. Shock.) As part of that, I've circled back on earlier writing to update my thoughts on the Tacitus passage being a very likely interpolation.

Hansen (edits from original) also is .... interesting elsewhere. Hansen apparently thinks Shushama Malik is the real deal. I don't. See here for her take. Elsewhere, Hansen gets puffed by KamilGregor, who I don't think a lot of, but, he notes she has NO academic biblical background. See here for publishing CV. Great.

Chrissy Hansen is an example of an independent researcher with no formal degree in Biblical studies and she currently has eight(!) academic publications in Biblical studies listed as forthcoming. In 2022 alone, she managed to publish six journal articles (and in good journals, too).

OK? Not OK. Gregor doesn't disclose that he's a co-author with her at least once. That itself is an ethical issue, and I've already had other reasons to dislike him, too. And, given that at least one of the journals is specifically geared to contributions from people with no academic biblical background, how peer-reviewed are they? They're NOT "academic," by definition, so scratch that.

That's enough there for starters; I'll have a full post about these sidebar issues in another month.

Back to Hansen's original claim.

Let's start by diving in more on the dating.

1 Clement 5 repeats claims that are, in many ways, dependent on the Pastorals, especially 2 Timothy, vis-a-vis Paul's final struggles. (I have long thought of 2 Timothy as being a novelistic short story of pathos and bathos, like a more tragic O. Henry piece.) In addition, re dependence on the Pastorals, or at a minimum, reflecting the same time in early Christian history, it talks about bishops and deacons in chapter 42, and a rule of succession for dead ones in chapter 44.

And, since the last quarter of Acts is non-historical and Paul wasn't a Roman citizen, he had no "appeal to Rome" as a hole card. His desire to get to Spain was surely nothing more than that. Yes, 1 Clement says "farthest limits of the west," but this only gets more spelled out for the first time in the Acts of Peter and the Muratonian Canon, both late second century. Also, here, it comes off like an "A to Z" thing, like Deuteronomy and 70 angels for the 70 nations of the world.

So, that's backup for me agreeing with other scholars (I see what I did) on a late dating for 1 Clement. The pastiche nature of later chapters, which do reflect books like Shepherd of Hermes, is additional reason for that.

And, even if it IS earlier? That's still a nothingburger of Christian legend, per what I said about Acts. Paul in all likelihood never got to Rome in the first place. And, if that's a nothingburger, so is the rest of 1 Clement 5.

Next? While 1 Clement 5 could be read as Peter being killed by inter-Christian strife, it seems more of a stretch on Paul.

There's other problems with that chapter.

When was Paul "driven into exile"? His time in Damascus ended with an engineered escape, not a driving into exile, and nothing else comes even that close. With Peter, to the degree Acts is historical, it mentions nothing about "many labors" for him, and thus we're in legendary territory here.

Rather, it seems more likely that this is all ahistorical, and the author of 1 Clement is simply "spitballing," looking for more modern examples of internecine territory.

Per my thoughts on the end of Acts' ahistoricity, it's possible Paul DID break the temple proscription, bring a goy in, and either get lynched or crucified. Peter? Maybe he got killed along with James. Or killed in the scrum of the Jewish revolt. But, neither of those would be internecine Christian violence.

But, the radical idea of this Hansen person, that Paul and Peter offed each other? Laughable. And, the claim that 1 Clement offers serious support for that? Even more laughable. (I am surprised that Hansen didn't invoke the idea I have about Paul's demise in Acts, and say that Peter was behind it. I might halfway believe that.)

It's like Robert Eisenman perusing the pseudo-Clementines and coming up with bullshit. And, since he's a semi-mythicist, Hansen ought to oppose that, too. 

Oh, while I'm here? That idiot Carrier thinks 1 Clement was written in the 60s. The "orthodoxer," inverted above, crushes such stupidity.

More trouble for Matty the LCMS boss with Trumpy pastors

 "Matty," as I love to call him, is THE (Rush Limbaugh type voice), Matthew Harrison, ongoing president and almost president-for-life of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the largest denomination of the conservative, nay fundamentalist (sorry, sis, but call it as I see it) wing of Lutheranism in America.

The latest trouble? As sis alerted me, one of his minions, THE Rev. Stephen C. Lee, is among Fulton County Attorney Fani Willis "Dirty 19." In more detail, per the NYT, he's got five counts:

2 counts Criminal attempt to commit influencing witnesses 

1 count Violation of the Georgia RICO Act 

1 count Conspiracy to commit solicitation of false statements and writings 

1 count Influencing witnesses

Tis true one is a Georgia RICO count and one a conspiracy count but three are first-level counts. And, the witness influencing? To put it in terms of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments, all three counts are attempts to get somebody to "bear false witness."

So, after starting this a week ago, I went to the Looserun Missourians Facebook, then the website again.

Crickets.

I told sis that he's out of Matty's grasp, being emeritus, but she said he's an interim pastor. Presuming the charges have reasonable evidentiary backing, he doesn't care whether he's in Matty's interim grasp or not.

So, having pushed a Nazi fellow traveler pastor out, but probably still facing more of "The Cross and the Swastika," to riff on an old book, Harrison has this on his plate. And, he still has the Hot Chalk lawsuit over Portland, and, though I've seen nothing about it, ex-student lawsuits, too; a full Portland blue-plate special, worth non-diner prices of tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions, not to mention the "pricelessness" of craptacular ethics, possibly from the boss man himself, on the student lawsuits. But non-wingnut LCMSers can't unite on anybody to replace him and when presidential voting goes past the first round, if it does, he wins, as the "moderate right" won't have all votes unite on the remaining candidates.

I think, to tie this back to national secular politics, Harrison's supporters, albeit much more quietly, rely on the national Democratic presidential argument that a vote for (Jill Stein, Cornel West, Howie Hawkins, fill in the Green blank) is "actually" a vote for Trump, and insinuate that voting for whichever of the moderate right candidates is on the ballot is actually a vote for the wingnut right candidate.

==

New news on Lee here.

Anal-retentive liars by implication among the mods at r/religion

 I've been banned for a week as of Thursday, and am sure that I'll be permabanned when I drop this post as part of my comments, and as a message to the mods there. Just like r/AcademicBiblical and its sister group, we've got butt-hurt dishonest moderators in a religion subreddit. What snowflakes.

What started it? This post, from a self-proclaimed theistic Satanist posing for an "Ask Me Anything." To which, I said.

Why would I ask you anything? Satan no more exists than god/s, angels or any other metaphysical entity.Edit: I'm also a secular humanist with a graduate theological degree, and an undergraduate degree in classical languages with philosophical study. So, I don't have any need to ask, either, any more than I would a believer in a world religion, whether monotheistic or not.And, it's no more proselytizing than holding oneself out for an AMA.

That then led the mods to get butt-hurt out of nowhere with this:

(A) Please do not ask others to convert to your faith, join your church, or other religious organization. 

(B) Please do not ask people to proselytized their faith to you. 

(C) Comments advising people to leave a particular religion or similar comments may be classified under this rule.

In response to which, I said in a new comment, with a quote of that, since the chickenshit mods don't allow responses to moderators:

Note to moderator(s) re that note: 

A: I did no such thing. 

B. I did no such thing. 

C. I did no such thing.

Boom. And, yes, the chickenshit mods are liars by implication, hence my edited original post.

Then came the second comment by moderators:

No drama about other subreddits or redditors here or elsewhere...for example, "Look at what the mods at (insert subreddit here) deleted!" or "This redditor at (insert subreddit here) is a joke!".

Followed, in good chickenshit style by the 7-day ban. And yes, anal-retentive liars by implication, it is chickenshit. Above all, as per the edited version of my original comment, I did no such thing.

And, they're even more chickenshit than r/AcademicBiblical or r/BibleScholars in that they hide the moderators list so you can't block them.

The deeper reality is that the OP was and is the evangelizer, with explicit consent of the mods. Allowing ANYBODY to do an AMA on that forum is by definition allowing them to proselytize.

==

Update, Aug. 25: It's official — the snowflakes have permabanned me.

Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/religion because your comment violates this community's rules. You won't be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.

Snowflakes. They then sent a second message with "toodles" in it. I'm crushed.

They then send a third message that said, in my email:

You have been temporarily muted from r/religion. You will not be able to message the moderators of r/religion for 28 days.

Problem? That and the "toodles" messages don't show up when I click the links. Only the first. Fucktards.

So, do I block them now, or wait 28 days, then block? The former. Per LBJ, no need to get (further) in a pissing match with pissants.

James Ossuary grifting tour headed to Tex-ass

 The Texas Monthly notes in a guest piece by Nina Burleigh that some Religious Right group, with the name of "The Nazarene," is grifting at $69 a pop for people to see the fake James ossuary, on tour for 8 weeks in the Metromess. The story adds that none of the Israeli court controversy will be discussed as part of the exhibit. Nor has a finalized list of other display items been given, but they all apparently belong to unconvicted seeming forger Oded Golan. "The Nazarene" website is likewise taciturn, but does note that for those not set out enough by $69, swag will be available at a gift shop.

Riffing on what Israel Finkelstein said during Golan's trial, about how this would spur other fakes, when I talked about old Concordia Seminary student peer Jeff Kloha going to Hobby Lobby's Museum of the Bible, I called it the "BAR syndrome." And on Hobby Lobby's fake scrolls, I noted it even suckered James Charlesworth.

My Goodreads view of Burleigh's book about the forgery follows:

Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land by Nina Burleigh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nina Burleigh gives us a story within a story in "Unholy Business." The shell, or outer story, is the trade in fraudulent and illicit genuine antiquities, with her focus being on the fraudulent ones.

That's the first "f" - the "forgery."

It's quickly united with "faith" and "fundamentalism." Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical non-fundamentalist Protestants, after centuries of their forefathers skewering the Catholic hankering for relics, are shown to be roundly hoist by their own petard. Maybe they're not after body parts, like saints' bones, but ostraca, etc, with Hebrew or Greek writing, let alone an ossuary? Different story.

(That's not to overlook the Jews in the story wanting a reinforcement of their connection with their heritage, whether their religious beliefs are that literalistic or not.)

Then, along comes the James ossuary to make the story inside a story, and to bring in the fourth "F," of filthy lucre. Long before this incident, Biblical Archaeology Review publisher Herschel Shanks was looked at askance by some for some of the ads his magazine ran and other things that had the possibility of boosting either the trade in illicitly acquired actual archaeological relics, or else a trade in forgeries.

Shanks, never a man to shy away from a good controversy, also gets hoist by his own petard. The book is worth it alone for her description of him:

"Shanks is an odd duck — lawyer, crank, P.T. Barnum and Indiana Jones all rolled into one man."

Sorry, folks, but "biblical" archaeology still isn't that scientific and, to the degree that it is, it hasn't verified a lot of biblical historicity.

That said, on a reread, after several moves, at a new library, new city, I moved the rating down from five stars to four. Without a second edition or a follow-up volume, this book was written too soon, in a sense. And it does have enough minor errors (or one larger one, claiming in one spot the temple was destroyed in 62) that it's not quite five stars. Given the wheels of Israeli justice grinding slowly even compared to America, as Burleigh notes, Golan's trial didn't finish until 2012. And, arguably due in part to sloppiness in investigation, he was acquitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O... Wiki's piece on the ossuary is a decent but not fantastic background source. It contains notable errors, including that no paleographer of repute has challenged Lemaire and Yardeni, when epigrapher (similar to paleographer) Rochelle Altman early on (before Golan's trial) repeatedly called the second half of the inscription a forgery. I added this to the Wiki page; see if it sticks.

View all my reviews

Contra Barbara Ehrenreich, et al, on mysticism and ineffability

This is both a highly condensed and refocused version of an obit I wrote about Barbara Ehrenreich on my main blog, one that I had not intended to become a "takedown" obit, but ultimately did.

It will focus on one half of one of her books, out of the three whose reviews I extracted for the starting point of that piece.

Sadly, she had a cropper with "Living with a Wild God." Given specifically her take on New Ageyness, and in general, given the appearance that she seemed to be some sort of non-metaphysical secularist, the fact that that wasn't the total case with her personal life, plus her hinting that there were things hidden behind a thick, heavy curtain that she wouldn't talk about, left this book well short of others.

Excerpts from my review will illustrate, along with observations about an interview she had with Harper's about the book, and an even worse one with Religious News Service and Fakeist (sic) Chris Stedman.

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Call this book review "The deep loneliness of Barbara Ehrenreich" or maybe "The Tragedy of Barbara Ehrenreich."

I wrestled with exactly how to rate this book. Her alleged metaphysical experience as a teen, and her return to it at late-midlife crisis time? That part's a 1-star, and I knew that when I had read an excerpt online. She even admits that, as William James notes, the physical "symptoms" she had of her mystical experience are not uncommon. Yet, she wants to mystify them, rather than noting that hypoglycemia, sleep deprivation of a moderate sort and stress could easily have caused her own version of a common experience. (Update: With excerpts from two links at the bottom, it now IS a 1-star.)

That's especially true in light of her history of depersonalization and disassociation. There's fairly solid evidence that some people are by nature more susceptible to such things. Or -- by childhood. As in, things like child abuse, which by happenings in her childhood she acknowledges, but refuses to identify as such.

Here's the basics on her childhood:
1. Two alcoholic parents, with an emotionally manipulative father and an emotionally unavailable mother.
2. A physically abusive mother. (Yes, Barbara, that's what "slapping in the face" is, especially when done with some regularity.)
3. Frequent moves. (She notes that a stay of 18 months in Lowell, Mass., was longer than usual.)
4. Marital trauma that eventually led to divorce not too long after Barbara's "experience," both remarrying, dad divorcing a second time and mother near that point before her suicide.
5. Some history of mental health problems on her mom's side of the family.

Well, depersonalization/dissociation is a kind of common "defense mechanism" in such cases. And, perhaps she had some inherited susceptibility, too.

The "solipsism" she later on discovers in her teenage and college self is another defense mechanism. So, too, in all likelihood, are some of the ritual behaviors of her pre-teen life she describes but fleetingly. So, too, as an adult, is writing about your own life in a semi-detached, semi-third-person style.

And yet, she can be "hard" toward others who have as many, or more, depersonalization experiences than her, even referring mockingly to a self-help website for depersonalization.

It's very hard to believe that the author of Bright-Sided could have written this. Unless, again, this is seen as cri de coeur first, paean to mysticism a distant second. But, her later interviews make clear that that is NOT the case.

View all my reviews

==

And now, that Harper's interview.

She owns up to lifelong atheism, even telling her undergrad alma mater she was a "fourth generation" atheist, but yet takes her high school experience as not just "mystical," but, if you will, a "theophany." I quote:

After a night spent sleeping in a car, she went for a morning walk in the woods and felt the presence of another being — she later said she “saw God” — then spent the next several decades ignoring the experience and hoping it wouldn’t recur.

Somehow, I missed in my review that she actually said she had "seen God." I might have 1-starred the book instead (while still being sympathetic to her as a child abuse victim).

Harper's interviewer Ryann Lieberthal then asks her:

What would you attribute those experiences to now? If you saw something there in Lone Pine, what was that thing?

And, Ehrenreich simply refuses to give a straight-up answer.

The interview about the rest of her work, beyond and based on the previous books she had written? Very good stuff. This?  Even though the rest of the part of the interview that talks about "Wild God" only has her talking about consciousness of other animals, that's bad enough. A PhD scientist (she was, and in cellular immunology, a biological field, no less) strawmanning biologists as claiming that about all of them don't talk about, or even reject, consciousness in other animals. 

And, behind that, since she didn't answer Lieberthal straight up? I sense a hint at the same New Ageyness that she excoriated elsewhere. Even worse, since she read the old journals, that led to the book, while being treated for cancer — the sidebars to all of that treatment and other patients having led directly to the "Bright Sided" attack on New Ageyness.

Oh, but wait, Googling, or Duck Ducking, "Barbara Ehrenreich" + "mysticism" leads me to find out that she even had an interview with RELIGION NEWS SERVICE about this, and there claims MULTIPLE mystical experiences. 

Since millions of Theravada Buddhists are also atheists, not believing in a personal deity, I now wonder just what she meant by "atheism." Was she rather just more "irreligious," like many "Nones" of today?

And, oh fucking doorknob, this gets worse yet!!!!

The interviewer is Minnesota Nice Piety Brother Atheist Lite, or rather, Fake Atheist, Chris Stedman. And, her fuzziness level on responses goes WAY beyond the non-responsiveness to Lieberthal. Extended excerpt:

CS: You’re speaking at the third “Women in Secularism” conference this weekend. Over the last few years there has been a lot of discussion about sexism among nontheists, and this conference seeks to continue that. Why do you think the atheist community is struggling around issues of sexism and harassment? 

BE: I don’t know. I don’t spend a lot of time in what you might call the atheist community. It’s not a word that I think would adequately describe me—it’s just a starting point. I don’t believe, but that doesn’t exactly define a community, except in some circumstances when we’re up against real discrimination, which we often are. So I can’t say I know much about sexism in the atheist community. Certainly the very prominent atheists have been white men, and I don’t know what to do about that. We need to add some women to the list. 

CS: What will you be talking about at “Women in Secularism”? 

BE: I’ll base my remarks on Living with a Wild God, and I’ll talk about growing up as an atheist and coming to question some of the foundations of the science I had been taught. I hope to emphasize that atheism in itself is not a complete answer. That’s just where we start from—we don’t start with any belief. We’re still trying to figure things out. 

CS: You say that atheism is a starting point. What comes after? 

BE: Anything you like. As an atheist, you don’t start by saying, “There is a God and he or it has arranged everything as it is.” Every question is open once you put aside beliefs like that.

"Just wow." Or, since we're headed that way? To riff on an old cliché? "Oleaginous is as oleaginous does," for both of them. Or, "Oleaginous knows oleaginous."

But, the Harper's interview, revealing the mindset behind "Wild God," led me to all of Ehrenreich, not just her most famous class-based book, or class and sociology ones.

Maybe Laura Miller at Slate gets it right — as with Dostoyevsky (and St. Paul), we can blame temporal lobe epilepsy. Only problem? Ehrenreich has never said she had any type of epilepsy. On the third hand, in the book, she never made clear what the family tree of mental illness was or was not.

So, intellectual dishonesty? Yes. First, on Ehrenreich's part for not offering straight answers to straight questions on mysticism and related metaphysical issues, and what got me started on "Wild God," for not being totally forthright on childhood history.

In July, on vacation, I had what I have already called a "secular spiritual experience." For part of it, see the "Split the Log" blog post of last week. That said, I found none of it mystical. Nor "ineffable," which is where I think Ehrenreich was headed, though weirdly, she never used that word. Nor did I find any of it "metaphysical."

Third, as far as the alleged inexplicability of such events? In a word, tosh. A better word to tackle? "Ineffable." In that RNS piece, especially, I think Ehrenreich was trying to insinuate her experience was "ineffable" but she didn't want to use that word because she was already standing on two stools.

Anyway, I'll take two angles on this.

The first part is from the actual science world, the world that Ehrenreich dissed in her strawmanning of biologists. (And, per feedback, that's part of her intellectual dishonesty.) Neither the quantum physics world nor the cosmology world knows which of the two, quantum mechanics or gravitation, wins out in the final shot at a "grand unified theory," let alone what's on the other side. But, nobody this side of Deepak Chopra claims that makes a claim that any of this is "ineffable."

DON'T even think about going Deepak on me. I'll kick you hard and after that, the conversation is over.

Second angle comes from philosophy of language, primarily Wittgenstein, but also a hat tip to ideas of self-referentiality from Kurt Gödel et al as explicated by Douglas Hofstadter in "Gödel, Escher, Bach."

To be blunt?

If a person were (note the subjunctive) to have an experience that they alleged was "ineffable," they could not use the word "ineffable" to make the claim that the experience was "ineffable." And, it's not just the word "ineffable" as a word, but as a signifier; plug in any close synonym and you'll fail again.

Per Gödel, there's the self-reference issue, but that's secondary.

Per Wittgenstein or related, there's the linguistic discourse issue. If the idea of "ineffable" / "ineffability" is that an experience cannot be described, then that apples to the two actual words (concepts). Ergo, one cannot talk about what it is to be "ineffable" as THAT would be indescribable. This takes us to Hofstadter and one of the GEB essays, where "GOD" is defined by the acronym of "God Over Demons." What we have, of course, is an infinite regress, a cousin of self-reference. And, trying to say something is indescribable when you can't describe what it means to be indescribable falls in the same class.

And, this is not just in public discourse.

Individuals cannot tell themselves that, in private mental languages. You cannot, not without remaining kiloparsecs away from knowledge as philosophically defined as justified true belief.

The bullshit of Jonathan Poletti reaches a new low, on the Shroud of Turin

Poletti, who has a Medium site popular with what I'll call "edgy evangelicals,", people who promote "dudebro Christianity" or whatever, claims the Shroud of Turin artifact really is 2,000 years old and that a new study proves that.

My response? Expanded from what I posted on Medium:

Bullshit by Poletti reaches a new level, including a flat-out lie with the Fox News line of "I report, you decide" in your headline, you explicitly claimed it's 2,000 years old, which even your new study doesn't, hedging your bet.

Bullshit on the original and bullshit squared in your response to CA in comments. CA is right; the test is NOT designed to test the Shroud's age, and in fact, the way it's conducted, and framed, comes off as handwaving to try to get the gullible to ignore that it's not designed to test its age and to give the Shroud-grifters (anybody you know?) an ammunition head fake.

The testers also give away the game with their statements about presumed and required preservation history. Anybody who knows anything about Turin knows it gets well below 20C in winter and that damp medieval castles and cathedrals got and remained well below 20C for weeks at a time without central heating. Humidity could also have gone well above 75 percent.

As for getting about 22.5C? Erm, there's this fire that burned the shroud that the authors (refuse to call them "researchers" as they're not) conveniently ignore.

(The original pseudo-research presumes the shroud was kept consistently between 20-22.5C and 55-75 percent humidity.)

Poletti admits the fire, and flooding as well, which would have pushed the shroud above 75 percent humidity. 

More specifically, here's their claim:

Moreover, it is interesting to point out that our analysis has shown that, in order for the TS fabric to be about 20 centuries old, it should have necessarily been kept at an average secular temperature of about 22.5 ± 0.5 °C and an average relative humidity of 55 ± 5% for 13 centuries preceding the XIV century. From Equation (5), it follows that if the average relative humidity was of the order of 75 ± 5%, to obtain the same value of the measured natural aging of 0.60 ± 0.02 for the TS sample, the average secular room temperature should be about 20.0 ± 0.5 °C. Therefore, from our WAXS characterization it follows that we have a range of allowed secular average room temperatures of 20.0–22.5 °C, correlated with a range of average relative humidity values of 75–55%, as climate constraints, for the TS to be a 20-centuries-old relic. These physical constraints on the secular average room temperature and the average relative humidity, obtained by measuring the natural aging of the cellulose of the TS sample, here realized through WAXS characterization, could help historians test their hypotheses throughout the possible locations in the world and historical periods in which the TS could have been kept during the 13 centuries before its documented history in Europe.

And, we know that the shroud was NOWHERE NEAR that well preserved on this tight of a temperature and humidity range.

Oh, "appears to be Jewish" means nothing. I "appear to be Jewish" because of what a hospital doctor did days after I was born. So that's a bullshit framing line, Poletti. As for details of why it might "look Jewish"? Per the Wiki link, probably because it's a deliberate forgery, and modern researchers have shown how it could have been done.

Back to the Fox News line of "I report, you decide," Poletti.

It comes off as an oxymoron, but will you be honest enough to admit you lied?

I already know the answer and it's "he won't."

He's an evangelical evangelizing doorknob. I've argued with him before but never busted him in a flat-out lie. 

And, hypocritical in that, if he's following the Calvinist version of the Ten Commandments, the shroud at least approaches being a graven image. It certainly is the spirit of one. It's an idol. That's especially true with it not only being a medieval creation, but — as recognized in that era, no less! — it likely being a medieval forgery.

==

But, the authors not researchers are themselves liars with the heading of their study, too: "X-ray Dating of a Turin Shroud’s Linen Sample." The study itself doesn't claim to actually date anything, once you look past the handwaving.

And, there's lies in their full study text:

Moreover, other dating methods agree in the assignment of the TS to the first century AD [5,10,11,12]. Spectroscopic methods, based on Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy/Attenuated Total Reflectance [10] and Raman spectroscopy [11], date the Shroud to 300 Before Christ (BC) ± 400 years and 200 BC ± 500 years, respectively. The mechanical multi-parametric method, based on an analysis of five parameters, including the breaking load and Young’s modulus and the loss factor, after an adequate calibration based on the results of two dozen samples of known age, dates TS as 400 AD ± 400 years old [12]. Estimates of the kinetic constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin suggest that TS has an age range from 1300 to 3000 years [5]. A recent numismatic analysis [13] proposes that TS was already present in 692 AD.

Bullshit.

Let's quote Wikipedia in response:

After years of discussion, the Holy See permitted radiocarbon dating on portions of a swatch taken from a corner of the shroud. Independent tests in 1988 at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology concluded with 95% confidence that the shroud material dated to 1260–1390 AD. .... The most recent analysis (2020) concludes that the stated date range needs to be adjusted by up to 88 years in order to properly meet the requirement of "95% confidence".

And add this from a separate piece on radiocarbon dating of the Shroud:

Despite some technical concerns that have been raised about radiocarbon dating of the Shroud,[5][6] no radiocarbon-dating expert has asserted that the dating is unreliable.[7]

Period and end of story. People working at some crystallography institute are grasping at straws.

Let's also note these are all native Italians. This underscores my contention that while formal church-going religiosity may be much lower in Western Europe than the US, non-structural religiosity is still pretty high there.

Finally, per Wiki's article on it, wide-angle X-ray scattering is not a scientific dating tool.

I also see, per Wiki's link on radiocarbon dating, that this is NOT the first time Sgr. Giulio Fanti has promoted Shroud bullshit. And, not the first time he's engaged in scientifically iffy methodology as part of this. Oh, and publishing your findings at places like the London School of Economics and Political Science also undermines you.

Fanti has also claimed to be able to date the shroud with infrared light, Live Science notes. So, if that was so perfect in 2013, why did you need to do it again with WAXS? Oops. And, because it of course needs to be said, infrared light is not a scientific dating tool. (Let's note that he self-references in the new study, to this study, when claiming that previous studies confirm a circa 2,000 year old date. Also note that he uses wiggle room by saying it's around this time — lest anybody accuse him of doing exactly what he's doing, namely, stacking the deck.)

And, Fanti is ALSO listed at another Wiki piece on "fringe theories about the Shroud of Turin." And, he's been called out for that bullshit.

Le bon David: David Hume as litterateur

James Harris refers several times to the idea of Hume as "le bon David." He and E.C. Mossner both paint him as being a "man of letters" as much or more than a philosopher, so let's just use the French there.

Two questions.

First, just how much was Hume "le bon," in dealings with Rousseau, James Beattie and others, and how much is this a legend?

Second, was he always that good as a litterateur? That's both in terms of his writing style and how much he, at least in materials not for public consumption (Burn this!) had his own sharp elbows at times.

Let's jump in.

First, Hume is without a doubt one of the most readable philosophers past or present. It's not just that he's easy to understand, overall, on most more technical stuff. Or that, even for his era, he's not that "technical" of a philosopher.

Especially as shown in things like his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he writes well. He's readable.

On the other hand, if one looks at things like some of his essays, at times he seems to be a "trimmer." As in, a writer of puff pieces. Oh, they have a certain amount of fluff style, or the 1700s England equivalent. But, they're fairly superficial.

Another place where the "litterateur" is fluff without a lot of substance? Slavery and related issues. Back to that again, yes.

Second, some of Hume’s alleged “anti-slavery” comments actually come off as stuff similar to what Stephen Douglas said about slavery’s potential in the High Plains and the West — simply utilitarian claims about where (or in Hume’s case, for how much longer as well as where) slavery would prosper. Douglas otherwise had no moral problems with slavery and Hume, to me, at best shows moral diffidence.

Plus, when it comes to the repudiated "Treatise" (and he DID repudiate, contra Harris, and I'll have a separate piece on just that), Hume had a thin skin. No other way to put it.

To undercut Harris’ (and Hume’s own) claim that “le bon David” never replied to critics?

Back to his 1777 Advertisement:

“Yet several writers, who have honoured the Author's Philosophy with answers, have taken care to direct all their batteries against that juvenile work, which the Author never acknowledged, and have affected to triumph in any advantages, which, they imagined, they had obtained over it: A practice very contrary to all rules of candour and fair-dealing, and a strong instance of those polemical artifices, which a bigotted zeal thinks itself authorised to employ.”

Methinks he doth protest WAY too much.

Hume, racism and bigotry, and rank hypocrisy

Per my presentism blog post and my post about James' Harris' 2015 bio of David Hume, he was a racist. But, how bad of a racist was he? After all, he reportedly opposed slavery, did he not?

Well, we're going to take more of a look at that.

First, in "Of National Characters," where Hume's now-infamous footnote about "The Negros" occurs, he engages in extensive ethnic and nation-state stereotypes of many people. (It includes some at least mildly anti-semitic items among those.)

Second, in reaction to a 1770 book by James Beattie, he changes the original footnote, which also slurred American Indians, to focus just on blacks.

Third, given the footnote, and the essay, were originally written in the early 1750s, I venture Hume had never seen an African in person. He'd briefly been in Paris, then to Vienna and Turin; neither the Hapsburgs nor the House of Savoy were major slaving countries. And, he'd surely never seen an American Indian, either.

AND? Hume undercuts any alleged scientific support for his own racism with this from that essay:

“The manners of a people change very considerably from one age to another.” 

The whole essay is not long, but given how known the footnote is, treating it in two pages is insufficient. Worse yet, Harris treats the footnote — only in a footnote! And, it gets yet worse from there.

First, in that footnote, Harris never actually addresses Hume’s racism. Second, he claims that Hume’s posthumous sharpening of the footnote was NOT in response to Beattie.

I simply find this untenable. I know WHY he claims that. To admit otherwise would be to question Hume’s own claim to not respond to his critics.

I can’t find a full version of Aaron Garrett’s piece cited, for free, online. But, Harris himself doesn’t give a summary of WHY he thinks Garrett has refuted Immerwahr’s claim that Hume WAS responding to Beattie. I do have this link to a free page, which gives an intro to Garrett's thought, here. He raises the anti-slavery claim to try to defend Hume, as well as Hume's comment that climate does NOT seem to affect national characteristics. But, see below.

While correlation does not necessarily imply causation, Beattie’s attack on Hume’s racism was the only attack we know of in Hume’s lifetime that was publicly maed. In addition, the fact that Beattie offered empirical evidence of culture, civilization etc on behalf of several specific American Indian groups, but not on behalf of Blacks, further sharpens the idea that Hume WAS responding to Beattie.

Also, on Hume allegedly being anti-slavery, which makes his racism more a head-scratcher? First, Harris DOES note that, per a letter to Francis Seymour Conway, 1766, he appeared to be acting as a broker for the sale of plantations in Grenada. Shades of Locke! And, if Garrett didn't know that, it undercuts him. If Garrett did know that, and ignored it, it undercuts him.

Counter this, some may cite “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations (1752, 1777) “ I would grant this as a partial though not total defense. He talks about the “American colonies” still having slavery … while ignoring the British Caribbean islands. And, his revision of that original footnote made it worse, by making it into specifically anti-Black racism.

Second, some of Hume’s alleged “anti-slavery” comments actually come off as stuff similar to what Stephen Douglas said about slavery’s potential in the High Plains and the West — simply utilitarian claims about where (or in Hume’s case, for how much longer as well as where) slavery would prosper. Douglas otherwise had no moral problems with slavery and Hume, to me, at best shows moral diffidence.

But, his doing so undercuts the whole legend of le bon David, which is a key thesis of Harris.

AND, it gets worse YET. Per the New York Review of Books’ review:

“As he acknowledges, readers who are primarily interested in Hume’s life should start with the biography by a late American scholar, Ernest Campbell Mossner, which was first published in 1954. Mossner’s life of Hume is suffused with an affection for its subject that, according to Harris, sometimes obstructs a “properly dispassionate” examination of the facts.”

Rather, in this instance, it is Harris who appears to have exactly such an affection for Hume that obstructs examination of the facts.

The reality is, as noted above, that “Of National Characters” is nothing more than a slapdash assembly of stereotypes of prejudice and bigotry. And, Hume, the supposed grand supporter of the science of experiment, palmed this all off. In reality, seeing something like this, written at the tail end of the first set of essays, and not revised later, should rather lead us to question many other claims of Hume’s about human nature. They may turn out to be right. Or they may not. 

In other words, we should refer to a Herbert Spencer phrase, beloved in preaching but rarely in practice, by Alcoholics Anonymous:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

That's exactly what Hume did. 

Besides, re that footnote itself? In the body of the essay, he talks about how easy it is to get Negros drunk and take advantage of them.

Now, the footnote, post-Beattie version:

I Am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.

There you go.

And, here's the broader pro-white background of the original version of the footnote, pre-Beattie:

I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.

There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.

This makes things worse, in some ways.

First, it shows how Hume sharpened his racism to be anti-Black.

Second, per Immerwahr, quoted in the piece, it shows the deliberateness of Hume's racism, contra Harris, who claimed it was only something minor.

Third, contra some of his defenders, it would at least leave Hume open to the charge of polygenesis. See Spencer's quote, above. And, yes, I've heard the claim that Hume didn't believe in that.

These people claim that Hume rejects polygenetics in the revised version. Does he? Remember, this comment: "Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men," is in both versions. At a minimum, it undermines the claim that Hume thought Black inferiority was primarily a matter of cultural environment.

Third, did Hume make the Chinese into "Yellow Aryans"? Or reject them entirely? And, India?  Answer: He ignores them.

Fourth, "Populousness of Ancient Nations," in claiming modern economies, unlike ancient Rome, weren't dependent on slavery, ignores American tobacco (cotton not yet a big deal) and Caribbean sugar in British island colonies — including at plantations whose sale Hume helped broker.

Finally, from that same piece, there's this bit, with Hume either doubling down on anti-Spencerian willful ignorance, or else entering the realm of public relations agent for Grenadine planters:

What else is there to say?

This.

It is computed in the West Indies, that a stock of slaves grow worse five per cent. every year, unless new slaves be bought to recruit them. They are not able to keep up their number, even in those warm countries, where cloaths and provisions are so easily got. How much more must this happen in European countries, and in or near great cities? I shall add, that, from the experience of our planters, slavery is as little advantageous to the master as to the slave, wherever hired servants can be procured. A man is obliged to cloath and feed his slave; and he does no more for his servant: The price of the first purchase is, therefore, so much loss to him: not to mention, that the fear of punishment will never draw so much labour from a slave, as the dread of being turned off and not getting another service, will from a freeman.

First, Hume the economist knows that when a "manufacturer" has an inexhaustible supply of "feedstock" for the "manufacturing process," it will be abused. Just.Like.This. So, they accept a 5 percent loss and await the next slave ship. They're not TRYING to keep them up more.

Second, hired servants can leave abusive jobs. (Theoretically; in economic downturns, maybe they can't.)

Third, slaveowners aren't obliged to ADEQUATELY feed and cloathe slaves.

Fourth, from the background of the whole piece, which talks about slavery in antiquity? It was more barbarous in some ways. But, manumission was easier, and it wasn't based on racism.

I'll add that this paper by Glen Doris has — in some ways — a broadly similar critique of "Populousness of Ancient Nations" and is very worth a read. Doris also says that defenders of Hume try to make this essay do work it just wasn't designed to do.

At this point — since Hume understood economics almost as well as friend Adam Smith — we're in the territory of rank hypocrisy.

I'll end there, noting that Harris is lucky, between deliberate overlooking by bracketing, and related items, that I didn't two-star him, rather than three-star.

And, per that "broader" link, I'm sure we could find rank hypocrisy along with racism in Locke, Kant, Voltaire, etc.

That said, Hume — and his footnote — still have defenders, like this piece here, from a person who is a Black Yale philosophy grad student. Johnson claims that Hume was writing "before racism existed as a concept."

Tosh.

Per Emmanuel Eze, the real question is: If Hume was not a racist, why did he feel compelled to keep in the footnote, and even sharpen it? (Eze also notes that Beattie criticized other parts and aspects of "Of National Characters." Indeed:

The fact that it survived Hume's multiple revisions and remained part of the Essays and was publicly defended from criticisms invites one not to dismiss this lengthy addition as marginal to Hume's thought but rather to determine why he might have felt it needed to be added in the first place, revised, and critically defended in what is now its definitive version. Relevant specific questions would be: why, of all other possible places (I have in mind, for example, a comparable essay "Of the populousness of ancient nations"), was the footnote added here?

Unfortunately, the free look truncates there. But given that I have also referenced "Populousness," these are all good questions.

Related? Immerwahr, mentioned above, talked about Hume's "philosophical racism," and Eze and other respondents said, why say "philosophical"? Indeed, to me, this comes off as "casual racism," including placing it in a footnote. Hume comes off as unconsciously asserting that surely no intellectual could disagree with this. (See famous names above.) Then, along comes this pipsqueak Beattie ...

Hume's "Populousness" must be faulted in another way which further illustrates his rank hypocrisy.

Hume claims in it that modern (for him) Europe was superior to ancient Rome and Greece because they had chattel slavery and Europe did not. This of course ignores the British (and French) Caribbean sugar island slave plantations, which, as Harris reminded us, Hume knew about personally from trying to broker the sale of some of them! Or, from his time in London, seeing plantation owners sit in Parliament! The French and British economies were very dependent on this. Remember, Napoleon tried to reconquer Haiti, and he did reimpose slavery elsewhere in the French Caribbean. Before that, after the Seven Years War, France let Britain have Canada as long as it could keep all of its sugar islands.

Again, this is not just hypocrisy. This is RANK hypocrisy.

==

Update: Julian Baggini goes in the tank for Hume. Undercutting him?

And? Undercutting even more Sir Tom Devine, the present-day Scottish historian he cites, claiming there was no push for abolition in Scotland in 1762, the time of his sugar plantation intervention, which he claims is in a "purported" letter?

In history we teach our students not to indulge in the intellectual sin of anachronistic judgement, i.e. never to impose the values of today on those of the past. In 1762, the year of David Hume’s reported letter on the plantations, there is no evidence that any groups in Scotland opposed chattel slavery in the colonies. The surge of abolitionism and widespread horror at man’s inhumanity to his fellow man only came later. In that sense, Hume was a man of his time, no better and no worse than any other Scot at the time.

Scotland was part of the UK, and was so for Hume's entire live. In addition, by this time, Hume had lived in London, and on the continent. (Amazing how the "world" of Enlightenment letters & ideas can be so selective.) Abolition was a happening thing in England; James Oglethorpe founded Georgia to be slavery-free, and for humanitarian reasons, before the original version of Hume's footnote.

And, Beattie and his mentor Thomas Reid? SCOT! 

AND? He's arguably wrong about "no evidence that any groups ..." Per that "happening thing" link from Wiki (which has a footnote, so shut up):

Some of the first freedom suits, court cases in Britain to challenge the legality of slavery, took place in Scotland in 1755 and 1769. The cases were Montgomery v. Sheddan (1755) and Spens v. Dalrymple (1769). Each of the slaves had been baptised in Scotland and challenged the legality of slavery. They set the precedent of legal procedure in British courts that would later lead to success for the plaintiffs. In these cases, deaths of the plaintiff and defendant, respectively, brought an end to the action before a court decision could be rendered.[8]

Also, per the same link, John Wesley, who created this organized group called "Methodism," started writing against slavery on moral grounds two years before Hume died.

I am tired of this. I've already told Baggini on Twitter that I'm going to do a new post. Basically, I see things like this as a version of Platonic noble lies, based on ideas that cancel culture or whatever is so evil all tools in opposition to it are fair game.

As for the British involved with the tower's de-naming not calling out China more? Two wrongs don't make a right.

===

Update, March 3, 2022: Via Massimo, Baggini continues this by, to put it politely, offering an overly charitable interpretation of Hume's socio-political bigotry.

In light of that, I should note that this time, Baggini has responded when poked with the Twitter stick.

And, yes, he may in this piece call Hume a "thorough" racist, but, given that in the Medium piece above, he also claims that this was "casual" racism and essentially a "one off,) and and that it's "presentism" to judge him by today's standards (and wrongly makes those claims, as shown)? 

"What the right hand giveth, the left taketh away."  

Or, to go Shakespearean in another way?

"Methinks you doth undercut yourself too much."

Seriously, how can one be a "thorough" racist and yet a "casual" or "one-off" racist???

Baggini claims:

I have indeed argued that you can’t judge by today’s standards and have to consider his times. But I certainly didn’t give him a total pass or assert the non-existence of abolitionism.
Do disagree but don’t caricature my position.

— Julian Baggini (@JulianBaggini) March 4, 2022

And, I quoted back to him his own comment from Medium, and Devine's comments that he appears to quote favorably. It may be too harsh to say that he's giving Hume a pass. But, I didn't actually do that. In my first Tweet reply to Baggini and the podcast touting him, I said:

Too bad it's unlikely Baggini will teach the full truth about Hume. #Philosophy https://t.co/PvYPsbzZE2

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) March 3, 2022

And, there you go. And, nothing in the last 24 hours since this conversation has started has made me change my mind. If I did say Baggini gives Hume "a total pass" anywhere, I apologize. Per informal logic and Bayesian probabilities, I do think he gives at least a 51 percent pass, and my believe in that has only increased.

Beyond that, re the "Populousness of Ancient Nations" discussion I note that Hume engages in deck-stacking on the issue of ancient vs modern slavery. There's nothing casual or one-off about that.

==

Finally, more and more, as I look again at his Prospect piece and other writing? I think Baggini, like Harris, like Dan Kaufman, and others, gets Hume of the Treatise vs. Hume of the post-Treatise, or the Pyrrhonic Skeptic Hume vs. the Academic Skeptic Hume, wrong, by not noting there is indeed a difference.

==

And, per a discussion on MeWe, sorry, but this DOES, if not detract from Hume's (or Kant's, Locke's or Voltaire's) work in general, at a minimum, it brings it under heightened scrutiny. I'm sorry that it doesn't for you.

==

More here on Hume's racism, which also notes that Hume believed in polygenesis.

Bible autographing is a thing?

Everybody and their grandmother mentioned in the Biblical genealogy of Two Corinithians has by now heard of Trump autographing Bibles for Alabama tornado victims.

This:

President Trump is signing bibles for  volunteers and survivors at a Baptist church in Alabama. pic.twitter.com/9b8VfyZiKF

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) March 8, 2019

is yet another reason this leftist, contra Arlie Russell Hochschild and fellow librulz, doesn't do "listening tours."

And actually, Trump autographing bibles (did he sign the first page of "Two Corinthians"? did he get his "cracker" [of the many crackers there]?) is only half as vulgar and one quarter as irreligious as the people who asked him for the autographs.

And, it's not just "the left" calling Trump out, contra fellow travelers at Red State:

I don’t know who it is a worse commentary on: Trump actually signing Bibles in Alabama, or the people asking him to sign a Bible.  Lordy Moses.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) March 8, 2019

That said, if Obama also did it, even for MLK's family, it's still theologically grotesque in my corner of the world.

But, that's Merikan Xianity, especially Southern style, in my corner of the world.

And, having grown up Lutheran, not Baptist or Church of Christ, even before becoming a secularist, it's not really "my corner of the world"; I just live here.

And, if the "Mammon" of which Jesus warned includes fame as well as money, this secularist, looking from the outside, says it is un-christian. It's also halfway to being a success gospel.

I have little doubt that Episcopalians and Catholics, as well as Lutherans, north or south, would look askance.

Tolkien no longer interests me

I first really noticed that a few weeks ago, when prowling the stacks at a nearby university library. Sorry, Kindle, it's not the same. Actually, I'm not sorry, it's just not the same. But I digress.

When in the P section, for literature, a tail end of one shelf caught my eye.

All Tolkien studies. J.R.R. Tolkien. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Lord of the Rings author Tolkien.

And, I then realized it's been at least, what, 7 years, if not nearly a full decade, since I read LOTR?

I may have read it once since Peter Jackson's third movie came out, but not too long since then. And, it's been at least 5, if not 7 or more, since the Hobbit. And surely 15 since the Silmarillion.

My background?

I read LOTR the first time about the time I started high school, which was a little over a decade after the first authoritative, copyrighted U.S. edition came out. In short, LOTR was riding the end of its first, hippie-era (which Tolkien was ambivalent about) era of popularity. I believe I then read the Silmarillion the first time when in college.

I remember the original Hobbit cartoon movie, the cartoon movie of the first half of LOTR, controversy over the second half, controversy over hearing Jackson would do a live-action version, seeing that "The Two Towers," at least, WAS produced as an action flick for 25-year-olds, nearly not going to "Return of the King" for fear he'd butcher it, and being pleasantly surprised at the ending.

I'm not a cultist, but, a decade ago, I was certainly an ardent devotee.

All told? I've read the LOTR cycle itself half a dozen times — as in read through, cover to cover. I've read the Hobbit that many times, though with less interest as I got older, even before the LOTR waned from my mind. I've read the Silmarillion through twice, if not three times. And, read most extraneous, Chris Tolkien-edited material up through Jackson's third movie in 2003, at least.

I don't know why it has lost its drawing power for me, but I know it has.

I've always read a lot more non-fiction than fiction, but my total ratio hasn't changed. Since last reading the LOTR, I've re-read Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, as well as first-read other material by her, and that within the last 3-4 years. I've read Huxley's "Brave New World Revisited" in that time, and material from a couple of literature Nobelists who have died in recent years.

I think part of it is that, in the back of my mind, as I've become socially, politically and culturally generally more liberal, Tolkien's essential conservativism has been unconsciously apprehended more and more by me.

Second? At my current age, I'm not sure I want some of the quasi-depressive poignancy the book invokes. Let me check back with myself in five years. And, yes, I know that Earthsea had its own sadly poignant moments, too. Other than the "Final Endings" though, I think they're better handled. That's because Tolkien's other seeming poignancy, lamenting modernity, is about as stovepiped as Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" setup, which I've noted elsewhere.

I think another reason Tolkien interests me less is Chris Tolkien. The flood of post-Silmarillion material, especially after Jackson's movies, seems off-putting. It seems highly capitalist, even almost crassly commercial. And, the older I get, the more anti-capitalist I get, flat-out loathing its greatest excesses.

In that sense, part of JRR's semi-screed against modernity resonated.

At the same time, he seems partially hypocritical. First, re forests, trees, and the Ents of Middle Earth, in actual England, forests were cut for firewood, for catapults of war and many other things long before coal began to be mined, which in turn fueled the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution. Speaking of, Tolkien can have his dwarves mine gems and precious metals, but interestingly, there seems to be nary a coal miner among them.

(Update, 2020: I didn't even think about the hypocrisy of printing presses requiring massive amounts of trees, and with the traditional paper bleaching process being environmentally unfriendly, and other things.)

And, back to those Ents. Shepherds of the trees. Shepherds of actual sheep raise their sheep for eventual slaughter, and, of course, shearings before then, but eventual slaughter. The analogy he attempts to draw doesn't work quite so well.

Beyond that, it was modernity that let his family emigrate to South Africa relatively easily. And it ws modernity that let them come back to England after his dad died.

Meanwhile, Tolkien left something else out of calculations with his beloved Elves. Even with many of the Sindar eventually going over the sea, and some dying from war wounds and other injuries, being otherwise immortal, and propagating with multiple children, over several thousands of years, one would expect Middle Earth to be blanketed with them. The population explosion would certainly not be Edenic.

In other words, while I don't know about LeGuin and other fantasy writers, Tolkien seemed to believe that somewhere, at some time, in actual Earth, something like Middle Earth existed as a generally blessed realm.

I'm writing this over multiple sittings, in quasi-diary format. I'm going to take a break again, as I risk moving into territory too critically cynical. (Jan. 4, 2019: There may be a second round at some point.)

I will add that I just watched, for at least the third time at home as well as twice at the movies, "Cast Away." It of course has its own degree of pathos, and one in a real world, and pretty realistic, setting. So, it may be that fear of setting loose the black dog at a less than ideal time in life is not such a driver against LOTR as I have thought. It simply may be that it is a taste that I have moved beyond for now, and perhaps permanently outgrown.